


Three For All

by SegaBarrett



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: AU, Gen, M/M, Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-04
Updated: 2015-09-25
Packaged: 2017-11-03 01:36:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 13,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/375623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walt, Jesse, and Gale are kidnapped by the cartel, and have no choice but to work together to get out of their bind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place around "I.C.U." 
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own any characters from Breaking Bad, and I make no money from this.

“I’m happy just to dance with you…” bounced out cheerily from Gale Boetticher’s car radio. 

He couldn’t believe that after all this, there was this final insult, final embarrassment – he had to go back to the lab, plead with the man who had just fired him (and in favor of _who?!_ Some little punk kid! Of all the people!) – and ask for the key he’d left in his locker, the key to the same in his apartment – why had he even brought the damn thing with him to the lab in the first place?

He supposed he could get the locks changed on the safe, somehow, but… still, he’d have to come up with some excuse other than “Sorry, sir, I left the key in the meth lab I work in, must have slipped my mind.”   
Or maybe it wasn’t about the key at all.

Maybe he was just looking for another reason to see Walter White again. 

To plead his case, and maybe more.

 _To tell him how I feel._ No, that was stupid. It was middle-school crap, boy-meets-girl ridiculousness that had no place in the world Gale was currently inhabiting.

But yet, there was still a part of him that wanted to do it. Maybe that had been the real reason behind the firing – maybe clear-headed Walter White didn’t want feelings clouding his judgment, so he brought in someone who could only vaguely follow simple instructions, because seriously, what could this kid be other than a simple gofer? He couldn’t possibly mean anything to Walt. It just wasn’t possible.

Gale had to get back into the lab with Walt. There simply was no way around it. Not to mention that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Maybe he was only thirty-four, but Gale wasn’t getting any younger, and he had no desire to spend the rest of his life screwing around with departmental politics at some dinky private college when he could be working with the best – hell, he could be _becoming_ the best. 

But only if he _fought_ for this. Only if he refused to let it slip through his fingers. 

The problem was that confrontation had never been Gale’s strong suit. He clammed up at adversity, rather than fight for what was his, or should be his.

Except this time. Because Walter White was his. Should _be_ his. 

Oh, what was he saying? What was he thinking?

He pulled into the laundry’s parking lot and sighed, resting his face in his hands a moment before shutting the car off and pulling his keys from the ignition. _Here goes nothing._

He pressed down the lock with two fingers and reminded himself to look into getting a new car. One of those ones with a button you could press to open it, instead of having to fish around and pull out the right key.

Too bad they didn’t make something like that for his apartment door, or, while he was harping on the subject, his safe. He was always losing his keys, always misplacing them, no matter whether he marked them with fancy little doo-dads on the end or put them on a keychain (not that he could ever find personalized ones with his name on them) or anything else he’d tried. He was just a scatterbrain – the only reason he could find his lab notes was because he left them on his table half the time.

He climbed out of the car and put his hands on his hips a moment, trying to focus on the single thought of _get what you want._

_You want Walter White, then get him. Reach out and take it!_

But the thought seemed as ridiculous as it had a moment before. 

What was he supposed to do, scrap with the kid for Walt’s honor, like two guys in a bar-fight over a pretty girl who couldn’t choose between them? What better way to just utterly humiliate himself than that?

No, Gale didn’t fight. Had never been a fighter. A quiet, gentle-hearted boy he’d been.

He snorted at the description as it floated through his mind; it made him sound downright bucolic, and perhaps in a way, he was. But he found no pleasure in that, as if he were Little Bo Peep or something of the sort, too docile to stand up and shove Walt’s new assistant away and _fight_ , for the love of God, _fight_!

He entered the laundry and found the secret doorway already open; he wondered at it a moment but was too caught up in nervousness to dwell on it. He started down the red spiral staircase until, at the bottom of it, he found Walter White and his new assistant - Gale’s replacement – bound and gagged and surrounded by armed men.


	2. Chapter 2

Walter White cursed silently. Gale showing up, wasn’t that just what they needed to make this situation even worse than it already was?

Walt could even handle being tied up, but having this piece of tape shoved in his mouth was way worse. He’d always taken pride in his ability to talk his way out of trouble, and this time, he was reduced to frantic murmuring that was probably completely unintelligible.

And Gale was still standing there, eyes wide like he was in A Clockwork Orange or something. 

And Jesse, God, Jesse – Walt’s eyes darted over to meet his, and he could see the frantic terror there, without Walt to help talk him down.

_Damn this gag!_

He tried to express reassurance through his eyes to Jesse.

_We’re going to get out of this, Jesse. I promise._

The men had burst through the door mid-cook. They’d been so quick that Walt hadn’t even had time to consider a reaction before they’d each had two guns shoved in their faces and had been ordered to their knees.

There were five men in all, each dressed entirely in black, like some kind of James Bond death squad. It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so terrifying.

But Walt’s injured pride was screaming loud enough to mute out the terror. How _dare_ they come in here and hold him and his partner up? Did they know who he _worked_ for? 

Then again, Walt was quite certain that who he worked for was exactly the reason that this was happening right now. Revenge by the cartel or some other nasty customer who has a business dispute with Gus.

 _Next time,_ Walt snarked in his head, _Try a fucking conference call._

One of the men turned towards Gale and aimed his weapon at his heart.

Jesse burst into a frantic array of exclamation underneath the tape.

“What?” the gunman demanded. One of the men, who was standing closer to Jesse, reached over and yanked the tape from Jesse’s mouth.

After a wounded cry, he yelled, “He’s a cook – don’t kill him – you need him alive – he’s one of us!”

“I am!” Gale agreed, flustered and putting his hands up as if to try and protect his face. “I’m one of them – don’t shoot – please.” His voice was devoid of emotion, as if he had yet to fully understand that a trained killer had him a trigger’s pull away from being completely wiped out of existence.

The men exchanged looks, before one nodded, and the gunman gestured to Gale.

“Knees.”

***

“I’m so fucking tired of getting shoved into car trunks,” Walt heard Jesse complain. It was pitch black, and the tape had been removed but Walt still couldn’t quite breathe freely, or get around the sense of being suffocated. _Having lung cancer is probably not helping,_ he thought dryly. His comfort was not helped, as well, by the fact that he felt an uncomfortable pressure against his groin. Uncomfortable, but not exactly _bad_ , and Walt didn’t want to think about the implications of that realization any more than he had to.

Instead, he spoke up.

“Gale, can you move your hands? They appear to have landed on my crotch.”

“It’s not me,” Gale called back. “I’m against somebody’s knee.”

“Uh, yeah, Mr. White. That’s me.” Walt felt Jesse wriggle to try and shift his position, which only served to increase the friction of Jesse’s bound hands against him.

_Oh God, no, please._

“Mr. White, are you…?” Even against the panic, Jesse sounded more than a little amused.

“Shut up, Jesse.”

Jesse’s chuckled reached his ears.

“Hey, Gale, don’t move your head up any or you’ll end up giving me a blowjob.”

Even in darkness and silence, Walt could sense Gale’s disgust with the comment.

“Where do you think we’re going?” Jesse asked a moment later.

“Mexico, I guess,” Walt replied.

“Long ride,” Gale piped up.

“Extremely long ride.”

Jesse wriggled again, and Walt let out a semi-conscious groan.

“I’m trying to get comfortable.”

“Well, don’t. Save your energy for when we get out.”

“What are we going to do?” Gale asked.

“I’ll get back to you in a few hours.”


	3. Chapter 3

Jesse was going to kill them all. He really, truly was. If he had to stay in this godforsaken trunk one more second.  
This had been happening way too much for Jesse’s comfort recently. If he wasn’t getting bound with duct tape by his ex-partner and his cousin, he was being held hostage by crazy-ass Tuco.

And now this. Jesse could barely breathe. Every breath seemed a herculean effort, and he couldn’t even move. If it was only him, it might not have been so bad, but he could hear Mr. White’s labored breathing and Gale’s own attempts, and that made him have the not-quite-irrational worry that one or both of them would kick it and he’d spend the rest of the journey sandwiched between two corpses.

Eventually, the car stopped, after a buttload of false starts. Jesse didn’t know what he’d do when the trunk opened this time… probably not lunge and try to attack whoever was there, given that that hadn’t worked very well with Tuco.

So when the light streamed down on him, he simply slumped further into Mr. White – at least, he was pretty sure that was who he was lying on top of. A few moments later, a strong grip on his arm was pulling him out of the trunk and slamming him on the ground.

Beneath him was… sand. Or asphalt. Or sand on asphalt.

He didn’t get time to figure it out before he heard Mr. White and Gale hit the sand next to him.

There was a long barrage of Spanish, before Gale mumbled to them, “He told us to get up slowly.”

Jesse did so, as well as he could with his hands bound, that was. It was like trying to do the worm at one of his high school dances or something. 

There was another series of instructions in Spanish, which Gale again translated.

“Uh, he said we’re going to walk to a car. That if we struggle, we’re dead.”

Jesse began to really regret never paying attention in high school Spanish, other than the day everyone had decided to look up different expressions for masturbation. Somehow he suspected none of them were going to come up here.

Walking to the car bound was difficult. Walking to the car, bound, with a gun shoved against his temple was considerably more difficult. He began to wonder why he hadn’t just rejected Mr. White’s offer, partners or not.

Sure, one and a half million dollars seemed a totally sweet deal. But he’d have traded it in a second to wake up without having to wonder who might shoot at him today. He’d especially give it up in a second to wake up next to Jane, to tell her how much she meant to him and just how beautiful she was. To really ditch the heroin and start over in New Zealand, live in a nice little house and be anonymous.

But that option didn’t exist any longer, and, frankly, Jesse’s options in general were getting considerably more limited by the moment.

The car door opened, and Jesse was shoved inside roughly before one of the others (he turned his head and saw it was Mr. White) collided into his side and then Gale slumped into the last seat.

His vision was cut off, suddenly, by some kind of cloth. A blindfold. That was a good sign, at least – Jesse remembered from watching a crime show that a blindfold usually meant that they were planning to let the person live. Or was that if the person was wearing a mask?

 _Same concept, right?_ Jesse thought desperately. _We’re all gonna live. Please, let us all live._

He didn’t know how long the car ride lasted. The sensory deprivation messed with his head and he wanted nothing more than to call out, complain and hear Mr. White tell him to shut up. Anything, just to remind himself that he wasn’t alone in this. But he had no way of knowing how close their captors were.

He had to find another way to pass the time. He started singing “round” songs in his head.

_Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, merry, merry king of the bush is he…_

But wasn’t that Australian or something? That got him thinking about Jane, about their plan for New Zealand, and that wasn’t any good, any brighter.

_The head bone’s connected to the neck bone, and the neck bone’s connected to the…_

Fuck. He ought to have paid attention in Biology. Was the neck bone connected to the collarbone? Maybe, but that didn’t seem like the next line. _What the fuck, anyway?_

The car stopped and Jesse heard a door open.

_There were ten in the bed and the little one said, roll over, roll over – so they all rolled over and one fell out, there were nine in the bed and the little one said –_

Jesse felt someone grab his arm hard, and he stumbled out, before someone undid the blindfold. He was standing in front of some kind of huge metal building, maybe a factory or warehouse.

“Where are we?” Jesse asked. Mr. White looked at him, his face projecting a kind of smug self-satisfaction.

“Must be our new place of employment.”


	4. Chapter 4

Gale was impressed. He hadn’t wanted to be impressed, of course, because being impressed with one’s captors’ lab seemed to be on the general spectrum of Stockholm Syndrome, like complimenting the ropes someone has tied one up in, but it was at least a pretty large facility, from what he could see.

The men led he, Walt, and Jesse inside, and as soon as they did, Gale’s awe decreased significantly. They had a nice set-up and all, and relatively advanced equipment, but the place was filthy. He could almost feel himself developing an intense case of OCD.

“This is your lab,” the man who was “guiding” (more accurately, yanking along) Gale hissed. “And these are your chemists.”

From the darkness, a number of men in lab coats emerged. All were bronze-skinned, broad-shouldered, and carried serious, almost bitter expressions.

Gale was really beginning to wish he had just stayed at home on this day. They – the ragtag team of the three of them, Gale, one genius, and whatever the hell Jesse was – were going to do what exactly? 

“Teach them.” He saw a man nudge Walt with the butt of his gun. “Go on.”

“Uh,” Walt began. “Teach them _what_?” 

Gale’s gaze went over to Jesse, who was looking around as if he was trying to figure out an escape. Like he could run out of there and catch a bus or something.

It was obvious who was the brains of the operation, Gale thought, a little bit snarkily. Then again, those brains had just given a smart-ass response to a bunch of large men with guns, so maybe they were just all screwed.

Gale decided to speak up.

“You see,” he began in Spanish. “We aren’t quite used to working under these sort of – conditions. Please forgive my colleagues. They are tired due to the long trip. I am sure your boss will want them to relay back to Gustavo Fring that they have been well treated.”

He flashed what he, for lack of a better term, pretty much considered “puppy dog eyes”.

“After then,” he continued quickly, “We would be glad – in fact, honored, to teach your men everything we know. However, we must coordinate. Each of us brings our own special skills to the table and we must,” Gale paused, blanked, but only for a moment, “decide how we will proceed. We are used to only working with one another, you see.”

Gale curled his hands together behind his back, considering this could go one of two ways – either they would accept his suggestion and they would all be able to buy themselves time, or the cartel would shoot them all dead.

He was really hoping it wasn’t going to be the latter.

“Forgive us,” the one man said in Spanish. Despite the snarl of his voice, he actually did sound vaguely sincere. “I will take your group to your quarters, and in a few hours. We will begin. As you will now be property of the cartel, we must be sure to keep you in good working order.”

Gale turned to the others and translated the message.

Jesse’s eyes went wide.

“Property? As in, like, slavery?”

“Sounds like it,” Gale murmured. “Let’s just all keep our heads down until we can figure out what to do.”

Walt glared at him, like everyone should be taking direction from him as opposed to the other way around, though all he had done up to this point was scowl.

They got back in the car, and Gale was thankful just to not be pressed up against Jesse again. This time they were again able to actually sit on the seats; maybe somehow Gale’s speech had led to them being treated more like guests than prisoners, in theory at least. Gale realized his backside was killing him, another reminder of the trunk.   
But they would figure out a plan. He’d bought them time at least.

 _Good thinking, Gale,_ he told himself, given that neither of the others were likely to say it. 

Once they got back to an apartment, albeit with only one cramped room with a single bed for the three of them and with guards noticeably stationed outside the doors, Gale breathed a sigh of relief and lay down on the bed, which actually looked vaguely habitable considering the circumstances. But maybe that was Stockholm Syndrome again, so he checked that thought at the door.

“So.” Jesse was the first to speak, and Gale’s head jerked up at the sound of his voice. He had almost managed to forget that he was even in the room. “What’s our plan?”

“Well,” Gale replied, “If we’re going to come up with one, now’s the time.”


	5. Chapter 5

If Walt had been in a more analytical mood, he’d have been examining the fact that he felt more resentful then relieved that Gale’s quick talking had bought them a few hours to come up with their plan.

Walt wasn’t in an analytical mood. He was in a generally vicious mood, too embittered to be properly afraid for his life – and, honestly, why bother? He was sure Jesse would take care of all of the shivering in fright for him. He always did, after all. Walt was the brains of the operation.

“We’re completely fucked if we teach them the formula,” Walt spat. “That’s all they need us for. After that, we become expendable to them, and to Gus as well. We need to stall.”

Jesse looked up from his spot on the bed, shifting and letting out a little hesitant sigh.

“What if we taught them how to cook, but kept it real vague?” he suggested, “Like, where they’d have to keep us around because they’d have questions?”

Walt scoffed at that, but Gale seemed to perk up.

“String them along,” he pretty much echoed, and Walt rolled his eyes.

“You do know the cartel doesn’t just hire chemists off the street, right?” he mocked. “This isn’t your buddy Krazy-8, Jesse.”

Jesse glared at him, and Walt felt irrational anger flood him. Stuck in another impossible predicament with Jesse! Exactly the way he wanted to be spending his last days of life.

But that particular rant in his head gave him pause; maybe this was how he wanted to spend his last days. He’d had fifty years of boring, predictable playing by the rules and it had succeeded in getting him nothing but a wife that didn’t appreciate him and a family that barely noticed he was there, when they weren’t thinking he was a spineless wimp.

Squaring off against the cartel had to be a step up from that, didn’t it?

“So we teach them how to cook the product,” Jesse said, “Then just hope that Gus doesn’t decide to eliminate us when we get back from, y’know, sleeping with the enemy.”

Walt leaned forward, holding up his chin with his thumb as he thought. He needed a brilliant Walter White plan. Neither of these two were going to come up with one.

It had to be him.

“What if you taught them, Gale?” he suggested, “It’d be good enough product to keep them happy, but not identical to what we’re making in the lab.” 

Gale nodded. 

“Well of course,” he gushed. “There’s no way that I’d be able to pull off your formula _exactly_.”

“Would they be able to tell?” Jesse asked. “I mean, they seem to not be guys to screw around with.”

“We could explain away any discrepancies as… differences in equipment,” Gale suggested. “Meanwhile, we work on, uh, an exit strategy. We have to get a message to Mr. Fring.”

Walt snorted. Mr. Fring? How bucolic was Gale, anyway?

“Yeah,” he agreed, however, “Gus needs his chemists – at least one of us, or production stops. And if production stops… it’s the end of Gus. He’ll have to come get us.” Walt smirked. They just needed to bide their time. He was priceless to Gus. The other two weren’t, but he could pull them along. Keep them safe. It was what he’d done with Tuco (“He’s my partner, I need him” – Walt barely suppressed a shiver). 

He gazed over at Gale and felt a twinge of guilt as he realized that he was looking at him with big wide admiring eyes. So much of his life he’d wanted people to idolize him. He hadn’t even been able to get his own son to look up to him. Now he had both Jesse and Gale falling over themselves to please him, and he felt it was more of a burden. Couldn’t they just figure out their own shit without looking to him? He wanted to shake them loose.

But he couldn’t. They needed him, and really, he needed them. He’d get them out of here, or he would die trying.


	6. Chapter 6

Jesse’s mind fluttered, a little like a butterfly that had been stripped of its wings. He was overwhelmed with memories, none of which he particularly wanted to touch on. He remembered how Tuco had beaten him, threatened him, and most of all that moment facing the sand, pleading with him, saying “I don’t want to die…”

Again, he didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to waste away in this strange land. But at least Mr. White had a plan, or was at least pretending that he had one, which was certainly better than nothing.  
The hotel room seemed way too hot all of a sudden. He grabbed his collar and tried to air himself out, gaining only annoyed looks from Mr. White and Gale as a response. Could Gale kiss Mr. White’s ass just a little bit more? It seemed like he was trying to be his shadow on this whole damn trip, and Jesse was already irritated by it.

He wondered what the cartel would do when they finally came to get them. Jesse had seen way too many movies and could, unfortunately, come up with way too many possibilities. If they were going to start pulling fingernails or breaking knees, they could start with one of those other two assholes, because Jesse hadn’t signed up for any of this. He should have just told Mr. White to get stuffed when he’d approached him at his house those months ago. Even jail would probably be preferable to whatever the hell was awaiting them.

His throat was chalky, and he mulled over all of his words before he finally spoke. But when he did, it didn’t really sound any better.

“Uh, Mr. White? You got any ideas?”

Mr. White glared at him.

“I’m thinking, Jesse.”

Jesse stuffed his hands into his lap and looked around the room, annoyed, but giving the older man a few more minutes.

“Well?”

“Yes, Jesse?” Mr. White hissed.

“You thought of anything good yet?”

He thought Mr. White was going to grab him by the neck when he stood up, and he slid his chair back preemptively. 

“Perhaps, Jesse, I would be able to think of ‘something good’, as you so eloquently termed it, if you were to shut the fuck up.”

“Hey!” Gale cut in, and Jesse rolled his eyes. “Arguing and bickering isn’t going to get us out of here and home any quicker. You know, ‘divide and conquer’? Seems like they’re doing it pretty effectively to us, doesn’t it?”

“Gale, let it go,” Jesse murmured, “He does this all the time. This is the only way he knows how to operate. Just let him yell and he’ll yell himself out and then things will get done.”

“I think we’d probably get things done better if we all chipped in and had our ideas heard,” Gale ventured. 

Jesse buried his head in his hands. Gale really had selective hearing, didn’t he? Mr. White didn’t want to hear his ideas, he wanted to come up with all the ideas and then have the other two of them stare in awe at him. He probably also wanted them to pat him on the back and tell him how smart he was, but Jesse didn’t have the effort. He just wanted to go home, smoke some weed, and go to bed.

In fact, Jesse wanted to do just about anything other than go cook for a bunch of cartel chemists and probably end up dead. Even going back to hang out with his parents seemed preferable to that…

“Why don’t we just do what we said we were going to do,” Mr. White hissed, “One of you two teach them. My money is on Gale because Jesse…” He just shook his head and Jesse rolled his eyes. Even in the middle of death-defying situations, hell, _especially_ in the middle of death-defying situations, Mr. White couldn’t ever leave him alone. 

Maybe that was how he stayed so calm, though. So above it all. Maybe he told himself that no matter how dour the situation might get, at the end of the day he could curl into his bed and tell himself that he was Mr. White, that he was smart, that he certainly was not dumb and unloved and pathetic like Jesse was.

But Jesse had to wonder how loved Mr. White was, too – if things were as bad with his family as they seemed, after all, had he lost the reason he was here in the first place? 

He gazed over at Gale. On the topic of love, that seemed to be an issue, too; Gale obviously had hearts in his eyes for Mr. White. For the life of Jesse, he couldn’t see why. Mr. White was just an angry old jerk, a smart one but really, nothing more, nothing less. He had saved Jesse’s life and Jesse’s owed him that but… he didn’t know if there was something more to all of it than that. How could Gale moon over him so much without even really knowing the man? Jesse knew him, and Jesse knew that it was complicated. Really complicated. 

Mr. White had an uncanny ability to be everything and nothing all at once, to be Jesse’s savior at the same time as he was everything that Jesse wished he never had to see again. He knew that Mr. White would get them out of this, and just the same he knew there’d be something in it that would make him reaffirm one of those promises to never see the man again, the promise that he seemed so utterly unable to keep. So why, why the hell would Gale want that? Why would he ask for that?

A sharp knock and a barrage of Spanish cut Jesse out of his thoughts. He turned to Gale, feeling like someone had stuffed cotton in his ears and he could no longer hear a word but through the older man’s intervention. He hated it; couldn’t wait to be back in goddamned America where he at least sort of knew what was going on.

“They said…” Gale began, “They said they’re ready, and if we’re not… then we’re dead men.”


	7. Chapter 7

Gale had tried really hard to not be frightened. He had set every single neuron to that one difficult task. But he was having a system failure, and it had gone long past frightened into utterly terrified and scared shitless.

The cartel were going to kill all three of them, Gale just knew it. He wondered which one would be worst – being the first to go, or the last. Probably the last, to watch Walt – Walt! – die, and just have to sit there and watch it, never having told how he felt, never getting that chance.

Wait, did that mean, if they were going to die… he should tell him, right? But how? And wouldn’t Walt say that this wasn’t the time, that there were important problems going on?  
His throat was dry as he tried to speak, as he tried to come up with a plan to save them all because someone had to, but wasn’t that Walt’s job? Wasn’t Walt the one who kept saying that he had all the answers?

“Snap out of it, Gale,” Walt hissed. Gale must have said some of it aloud, or maybe he was just shaking or something. He tried to snap out of it. He couldn’t slow the group down. He had to do his part, other than just being the Spanish translator.

“Okay.” Gale whispered the word. “What are we going to do, Walt? What are we going to do?”

“I swear to God, if both of you don’t stop asking me that, I am going to strangle you both,” Walt hissed. “We fake them out to stall for time. And then we…”

“Try and get in touch with Gus?” Jesse suggested.

“And put our fates in his hands?” Walt barked back at him. “You do know that he only needs one of us alive, right? And quite frankly, that one of us would be me.”

“Thanks for taking a moment that we’re most likely going to die in, and using it to be a complete dick,” Jesse complained loudly.

“Listen. Both of you!” Gale declared, desperately trying to keep the arguing under control. “Maybe, once they bring us out… maybe then we can spot a weakness. Maybe we can figure something out. Right now, we’re doing a lot of speculating and that isn’t really helping very much.”

“Jesse, I’m a little more concerned about my life than that I’m not being warm and fuzzy enough for you!” Walt yelled at Jesse. 

“Suck a dick, Mr. White!”

“Okay, actually, exactly what I was…” Gale tried to cut in.

“Jesse, I swear to God if you get us all killed, I’m going to strangle you, you pathetic junkie!” Walt hissed.

“Yeah, okay, go ahead and…”

“WALT! JESSE!” Gale screamed. He had never screamed like that before in his life; nay, he had not even known it possibly to scream at that volume. He had always been a quiet sort of kid who had turned into a quiet sort of man. But without the volume, without the screaming, he knew that Walt and Jesse would not listen.

They whipped around. They were listening now.

“We don’t have a shot if you fight. Honestly, right now, I’m not even sure if we have a shot if we all stick together. But if we work together, at least if we go down, we go down knowing we tried fighting them the right way. We can stall, sure we can stall, but when that all runs out, we need to know what our Plan B is. Walt… Jesse… got any of those up either of your sleeves?”  
Walt looked between them for a long time; he looked almost offended at Gale’s chastisement. At last, he spoke. 

“What if we fought our way out?” 

The other two men stared at him.

“Did you just say… now, I’ve gotta have wax in my ears or some shit, because it sounded as if you, Mr. White, you just suggested that we ought to fight our way out against a whole shitload of cartel and then escape into a country we know nothing about.”

Walt’s lips curled into a smirk.

“That’s exactly what I just suggested.” He looked around the hotel room, musing at something unknown.

“Have you completely lost your mind?” Jesse pressed.

“That’s a possibility,” Walt replied sarcastically. “But it’s really our only chance. Both of you are going to have to fess up to the fact that if we sit here and wait for Gus to save us, two of us are going to die and the survivor is going to live out the rest of his days cooking meth for these cartel madmen. And I don’t have that in my cards. I’m going home to my family.”

“And give up cooking meth?” Jesse asked. Walt looked at him with an annoyed glance.

“Of course not, Jesse. I’m on top. I have to stay there.”

Gale looked back and forth between the two. Walter was the best, this was true, but why wasn’t he just eager to get back to this family that he apparently had waiting for him? Gale certainly wasn’t thinking too far ahead as far as the lab went, so he didn’t know how Walt could still be insistent upon it. Wasn’t it time for those promises to themselves or to God or whoever might be listening that if they got out of this one alive, they’d change their ways and take the right path? That’s what was caught on repeat in Gale’s mind, at least.

“We’re going to need to find weapons in here. We need to think outside the box,” Walt stated, not even stopping to expand upon his thought. 

Jesse rose. Gale thought that he was going to offer more protests, but instead the younger man’s shoulders simply slumped, and Gale noticed a look of defeat crossing his face.

“Let’s tear this place apart,” Jesse said in a quiet voice. “There’s got to be something here.”


	8. Chapter 8

“I saw a movie one time where someone made this into a weapon. Like, a prison movie.”

“Jesse,” Walt said, staring at him with a fury that probably could have fueled a small town. “That is a toothbrush. A toothbrush is not going to do a damn thing against the cartel!”

“It’s a start,” Jesse protested, and Walt wanted to slam his head against something; not to hurt him, of course, but merely to knock some sense into that hard head of his. They needed to come up with an actual plan, and things Jesse had seen in some movie didn’t really qualify.

“What if we used something in the lab?” Gale suggested, “We could make all kinds of… diversions.”

“Mustard gas!” Jesse exclaimed. “Just like you did in the RV!”

Walt glared at him. Why the hell was Jesse pointing out that Walt had murdered two people by that method, in front of Gale? Admittedly Gale was less than likely to go talking, but still. Jesse should have more sense.

“It would certainly wipe out the cartel,” Walt began dryly, “And the three of us with it.”

“We’d have masks,” Jesse continued.

“Will we, though? I don’t know how advanced these… chemists are,” Gale pointed out. “We probably won’t be equipped with the same protections we had when we were working for Mr. Fring.”

“Oh, get off it and just call him Gus, Gale!” Walt hissed. “Unless you trying to suck his dick is going to get us out of here!”

Gale’s eyes flashed in surprise and embarrassment. Walt saw Jesse biting down a laugh. Let him laugh now. It wasn’t funny.

“Listen, Mr. White,” Jesse said a moment later, “Even if our plan doesn’t work, we need to have one. I mean, you’re the smartest one here. Come up with something! You’re the one who got us out of the desert… You’re the one who knows what you’re doing more than any of us.”

Walt crossed his arms and thought. He thought through every possible permutation that crossed his mind, but every plan seemed to fall short of success. But Jesse was right, in a way – most of his great plans hadn’t had been foolproof. Blasting out Tuco’s windows had worked, at least short term, but the ricin plan hadn’t. The ricin… If only they had the material available to make ricin. But would they be able to not get killed while waiting around for it to work? Probably not, and there were multiple cartel associates so even if they poisoned one, that didn’t help them very much.  
He needed something that could do maximum damage, but only to the people they actually did want to damage. The number of things that could both do this and were readily available would make an exceedingly short list.

He found himself thinking of Skyler again, of Junior and Holly as he wished that he could be back home with them, sitting on the couch, watching Jeopardy and just living his life, even if that was more of a fake life these days, even if Skyler had kicked him out on his ass.

They didn’t have much time to debate it any further, however, because their conversation was cut short with the opening of the door.

A tall Hispanic man, one they hadn’t seen before, entered the room.

“Welcome to Mexico,” he told them in a crisp tone, with impeccable and unaccented English. “I hope you are finding your accommodations to be to your liking.”

Walt shot Jesse a look, warning him not to say anything. 

“My name is Dr. Richard Vasquez. I hold a Ph.D in Chemistry from Washington State University.”

“Impressive,” Walt said, and not entirely sarcastically either. “Washington State’s program is very well regarded.”

Gale made a little noise in his throat.

“I heard that it’s been steadily going downhill, actually. The publication record has been…”

Jesse leaned over and proceeded to stop on Gale’s foot, causing him to cry out in pain. He gave Jesse an offended look.

Vasquez ignored Gale and looked at Walt again.

“I see you brought two assistants,” he commented.

Walt nodded. That was really what they were, both Gale and Jesse. Neither of them would amount to much of anything in the lab without his guidance. He hoped neither would quibble and neither did.

“They’re very capable,” Walt told Vasquez. “They won’t get in anyone’s way. As you must know, cooking is definitely a two or three man job if you want to do it most effectively and get the best results… by which I mean the best purity and, then on, the best customers and the most money… which, I know, are the results you are most interested in, Dr. Vasquez.”

“And what kind of training do your assistants hold?”

“Mr. Boetticher here has a Masters,” Walt explained, “And Mr. Pinkman… well… he was trained personally by myself.”

“And yourself?” Vasquez prodded. “What is your own training? I notice you are not… Dr. White…”

“I have a Masters from Caltech,” Walt replied dryly, though he told himself inwardly that he was probably brighter than most of the Ph.Ds he had met. A lot of them were just straight-up blowhards anyway; the few real geniuses who he had run into at the college level usually got run out of their departments because they made the rest of the lay-abouts and kiss-asses look bad, so what was the point? Plus he couldn’t have raised his child on a grad student’s salary, not with Skyler not working… But he couldn’t say any of that. It would make him sound bitter. “I went into industry.” That much was true. He left out the part about teaching pimply-faced high schoolers who didn’t want to be there. “But I think 99% purity would at least equal an ABD.” He smirked dryly. “Now, did we come to discuss my exciting life story, or are we here to make you more money than you could count?”

“That’s right, Señor White,” Vasquez replied with a smile, though there was something bitter behind it. “It’s time to make a lot of money together.”


	9. Chapter 9

Jesse looked around at where they’d been taken to; if he didn’t know he was a hostage, he would have thought that he had been invited to the best pool party of the year. There was red brick beneath them and an expansive pool; the water was bluer than anything Jesse had ever seen in his life and he wondered vaguely how they managed to keep it so blue, before deciding that they probably had somebody whose job that was. They were probably here against their will, too, which was an incredibly depressing thought.

“Wow,” he breathed out, and Mr. White shot him a glare, one that said in no uncertain terms that he should shut up and let him do the talking. Or, perhaps, let Mr. White do the talking through Gale, considering he was the one who could speak Spanish. Between the two of them, Jesse couldn’t help but wonder what he was even adding to the equation. He wished he could just walk back out and leave the two of them to bicker with the Mexican chemists about how to do this; he was probably missing a quality episode of Sons of Anarchy or something.

Jesse forgot whatever he was thinking about as he heard a man presumably greet them, in a torrent of Spanish. He looked up to see a man who wasn’t fat exactly, but was somehow larger than life, broad-shouldered and with a smile that reminded Jesse of Tuco. A chill went down his spine. They had to figure out a way to get the hell out of here, to make a break for it. There was no way this could end well and, unlike with Tuco, now they were nowhere near home whatsoever. They weren’t getting out of this one by walking down a road and having Mr. White pretend to have had a fugue state.

He stared at the man, trying to think back to anything he had learned when he’d had to take Spanish in, what, seventh grade? That was right, seventh grade, and eighth grade had been French and he didn’t remember a word of it; all he recalled from either class was he and Emilio howling in laughter when they found out the word for nineteen was “dix-neuf” and they immediately pronounced it as “these nuts” instead. 

Back when Emilio had been alive. Before they had dissolved him in Jesse’s bathtub.

“He’s welcoming us to his home,” Gale explained to Jesse. “He is known as Don Eladio. We… belong to the cartel, now. But he says we’ll be given every luxury.”

“I can do without their luxury,” Mr. White muttered, but Jesse was too shaken to say much of anything. Belonged to the cartel? What did that mean? Were they all meant to be slaves, to be worked like mules to cook meth until each of them died? 

Andrea and Brock would never see Jesse again. Would never even known what had become of him. He would die in this place.

“What was that?” one of Don Eladio’s men asked in English, and Mr. White shook his head.

“Tell them I said… I’m gracious for their hospitality,” he told Gale, and Gale relayed something in Spanish back to them, which they seemed to be satisfied with.

“They said that it’s time to go to the lab,” Gale continued. “They want to see what we can do. If we’re really as good as they’ve been told.”

“Does this feel like The Devil Went Down to Georgia to anyone else?” Jesse inquired to no one in particular, and no one responded. As they moved along, he added to his question, “And if we aren’t?”

“I think we all know the answer to that question, Jesse,” Mr. White replied, in a tone of voice that indicated that he wanted Jesse to shut his mouth. Jesse let his mouth slip shut, but his mind was still going nonstop, wondering how in the world his former teacher was going to get them out of this. He had to have a plan, though. He’d make a buggy or a rocket or a robot. Mr. White would save all three of them. 

Jesse almost dozed off as they walked towards where the lab must be; he was so exhausted after the effort he had expanded that he barely seemed to notice it as they piled into a small car and were each given blindfolds. Jesse thought that was pretty superfluous, considering that he didn’t know where the hotel or the mansion were in the first place, so how the hell would he be able to take anyone back to the lab? He knew better to ask, though. Instead, he just let his eyes, hidden behind the blackness of the blindfold, slip shut as he leaned his head against the window.

He was dreaming of reds and whites, and wispy blue, so much blue, when they pulled up in front of what looked like a huge factory. This must be the lab, he considered, but it didn’t look like very much. It looked like the kind of place that homeless people hung out in back home. Then again, he could barely even tell if he was dreaming or actually living anymore, so what did he even know about it? He needed to listen to Mr. White and keep his mouth shut tight if he wanted to get out of this.

Maybe if he got out of this, he’d even go back to his parents, hell, maybe even back to rehab, if only to have some place safe to stay for once in his life. Nothing here was same, not this road, not the car, not even, it seemed, this whole damned country.

They walked through a rusted door into a room that looked like it had never been cleaned since it was built. Jesse had to hold his breath to keep from coughing or choking.

He was snapped out of it, however, when Vasquez stepped in front of him and started looking him up and down with a sneer.

“Let’s start with this one,” he declared, in a voice that shook Jesse’s bones like the played keys of a piano. “I want to find out what he knows.”


	10. Chapter 10

Gale realized that he had never really thought about where he would like to be buried. He’d always considered that he would get cremated, and then his ashes would be scattered over Bangkok perhaps, or somewhere equally exotic, so that he could travel with the wild Eastern winds, listening to flutes play and watching people dance.

Instead of keeping to that morbid thought, Gale found himself remembering.

He’d been living in Pennsylvania when he was a kid, and he had always been the nerdiest one in his class, the one staring out the window and wondering how the universe had managed to come together while his teacher droned on about something that was at least four paces behind where Gale’s mind had gone to. It hadn’t been easy being a genius or a prodigy or whatever label someone wanted to place on it – where his academics and intelligence had flourished, his social skills had always lagged behind.

Now, he wondered if learning some of those social skills could have helped him out in this particular situation. Maybe if he knew how to bargain or, hell, even how to flirt (not that he wanted that thought in his mind with Walter so close and so oblivious even this close to death), then he would know how to extricate them all. Because there was no way in hell that the kid, that Jesse, was going to be able to do anything at all to wow these men with degrees and aptitude and they would all be dead soon after him, he was sure of it. 

“All right, yeah,” Jesse said, and Gale watched him in the same way a looky-loo would gaze at a particular horrible car accident, unable to look away despite wanting to be anywhere other than here. “Let’s get this started.”

He started by looking around.

“We’re going to need to start with the…” He turned and looked at Walt. “The phlenylacetic acid.”

“Okay,” Dr. Vasquez began. He didn’t move from his spot, however, and Jesse furrowed his brow.

“Why are you just standing there?” he inquired. “Where is it?”

“We make our own,” Dr. Vasquez replied, turning up his nose. The jig already seemed to be up; Jesse couldn’t have more than a high-school level knowledge of chemistry, if that. Why the hell had Walt chosen this…man, if Gale could even call him that (more like a punk ass kid he would chase off his lawn for drinking beer), to replace him? Unless Walt was sleeping with him, or being blackmailed by him, or maybe Jesse was his cousin or the son of a man to whom Walter had owed a great debt for saving him during the war (which war, Gale wasn’t sure – likely Vietnam or less likely, Gulf I), but no reason that had to do with talent.

Gale opened his mouth and decided he needed to do something, needed to intercede for the three of them. It wasn’t that he was that attached to Jesse – he certainly wasn’t, and the kid was his rival, wasn’t he? – but letting someone get killed in front of him seemed distasteful in a rational way, more-so than in an emotional way, and the quicker that Vasquez dispatched with Pinkman the sooner he would be moving on to the two of them instead. 

In Spanish, he posed, “Senor Pinkman is just not used to making the phlenyalactic acid himself. We do it differently back home.”

“What are you telling them?” Walt chimed in. “I can do this for Jesse. Jesse is a vital part of the process, but Gale and I, we are the chemists.” His voice began to rise with indignation. “We are the ones with the talent!”

“Hey now!” Jesse cut in, “You said my meth was as good as yours!” 

Vasquez’s lips curled into a grimace.

“Children,” he grumbled, “Fight amongst yourself on your own time, not on the cartel’s.”

“We aren’t fighting,” Walt spoke up. It sounded as if he was offended at the implication, and probably even more so at being called “children” by a man who was younger than him. That was all well and good, Gale figured, but it also wasn’t exactly the issue at hand.

He wished they had spent more time actually planning and less time bickering. He wished they had actually come up with a plan at all back in the hotel room. But these three… they just couldn’t work together as a unit… Gale was starting to understand where the phrase “Three’s a Crowd” had come from.

“We need more time!” Gale spoke up in Spanish.

“My tolerance and my patience is not neverending…” Vasquez began. Gale decided it would be better to not point out that he had used a double-negative.

“I understand, Senor Vasquez,” Gale agreed, “But Pinkman… he needs… He is not as good as us… he is…”

“What are you saying?” 

Apparently Pinkman had understood enough.

“There’s no acid right here, right now? Then we’ll make it. I don’t know why you bothered to call us all here if you weren’t ready for us. Don’t waste our time.”  
Gale took a moment to shut his eyes. They’d bought some time, but he’d have to think up something a lot better, and fast. Walt wasn’t exactly at the top of his game, after all, and if he wanted anything from him – or anything out of life at all, he would have to come up with something better.

He found himself thinking of the days at school where he’d pooled over science books, thinking about how fascinating the words and concepts within them were, as the rest of the class rolled their eyes and just didn’t understand.

Was one of those concepts going to save his life?


	11. Chapter 11

Jesse thought of dreams he used to have. The dreams where he was taking a test that he wasn’t prepared for, and no one had told him there was going to be a test. The dreams where he was back in high school, where he’d never left and he got older and older while everyone else in the class seemed to be younger and younger. Sometimes they were the same kids he had gone to school with, but they were still in suspended animation and Jesse, Jesse had tried to move on.  
There was a test, a test he could never pass and so he would always be held back. He pictured himself never leaving Mexico, just sleeping forever under a tree, buried under red dirt and sleeping forever, eyes shut. Never seeing anyone again, never knowing anything, never conscious. Never passing, never moving on, not really.

“Pinkman.” Vasquez sounded impatient. “Are you paying attention?”

“Yeah,” Jesse mumbled. 

“We will make the acid for you, but you must understand that if this product is not superior… we are not here to play games and we tire of your antics very quickly.” 

Jesse knew what that meant. If he was lucky, it would mean that he got taken out and shot, reduced to nothing and buried in the desert somewhere, with scorpions and shit eating his bones. If he wasn’t lucky, the scorpions would be getting at him while he was still around to yell about it.

He gave a nod, trying to make it look like he was completely self-assured, when he had never been less assured in his life.

A million plans were going through his head, a million plans that couldn’t ever possibly work. Jewel-thief kind of shit. Climbing into the place, or out of it, using grappling hooks and wearing masks. He’d read a book like that as a kid, a dark book where that had happened. Someone had broken into a store that way.  
But there were no hooks here, no grappling systems, and if he could even get out, where would he go? There was no one around for miles who would want to help them. Anyone who they’d find who might even be sympathetic would be terrified of the cartel, and Jesse couldn’t even blame them. He knew that he was.   
They would need a vehicle, and a good enough head start.


	12. Chapter 12

Even after the first time, Walt had never seen himself as a killer. When he had strangled the life out of Krazy-8 in Jesse’s basement that one day, he had seen it as a necessary evil. And he was beginning to see the room as filled with necessary evils, people not dying so much as simply disappearing, as if Walt had taken an eraser and simply taken them out of the picture. Edited things somewhat to make everything more palatable.

He had to figure out what he was going to do, and he couldn’t get moral about it. They would need to kill a lot of men to get out of this one, and even if he knew he could do it, he wasn’t sure that either Jesse or Gale could. Jesse was a kid, just a kid – he’d fall apart if he tried to take another man’s life. And Gale, even if he somehow found it in his moral compass to do so, probably didn’t have the skill. Unless…

An idea appeared in Walt’s mind, a devious plan that just might work. He’d still need to figure out how to get them home, however. It would just as likely get them all killed, but he was going to do it anyway.

He took a deep breath, as well as he could considering the circumstances. He’d gotten that new lease on life with his remission, but his breathing didn’t seem like it had ever gone back to normal. It felt like he would be breathing shallow for the rest of his life, never quite able to sink back into it. Always on the surface or the razor’s edge.

But never closer than this very moment.

“I want to show you what I can do.”

“We were supposed to see what Pinkman could do,” Vasquez argued, but Walt shook his head.

“I have a Master’s,” he snapped, bringing himself up as big and proud as he could. He should have gone back for his damn doctorate, should have been teaching at a big name university instead of wasting time at that high school. But then he never would have met Jesse, never seen the man he could really be. The man he was being right now. “I’m the master. They’re my assistants. Watch me.” Before Vasquez could argue, Walt had walked up to one of the tubs, as if he was simply meant to be there. The man could shoot him; hell, any of them could if they wanted to. He had to hope their curiosity outweighed that particular urge.

Walt began a motion that was as close to dancing as he’d ever done. He grabbed a few chemicals off the shelf, his heart beating, acting as if this was what he always did. These men would not trick nearly as easy as Krazy-8 and Tuco.

Jesse, very much in tune to Walt these days, seemed to catch on and began talking, babbling about nothing at all.

“Listen man, so when are we going to see the sights? You know, find out what the word is in Mexico?”

“What the hell are you even talking about?” Vasquez asked, turning to look at him. He turned back to his men and finally caught sight of what Walter was doing. “Get them!”

But it was too late. Walt uncapped one beaker and poured it into another, then threw it as if it were a Molotov cocktail, and it might as well have been. It was so reactive that it didn’t even hit the ground before it exploded into red, yellow, orange.

“Jesse! Gale, duck!” he yelled. He jumped on top of Jesse and brought him to the ground. There was chaos all around. “Run!” he yelled a second later, and he was pulling Jesse back up again. They were running. Someone was screaming. He hoped Gale was behind them but there was no time to go back, no time to even look back, like he was Lot and Gale would just turn to a pillar of salt if he turned back, or a pile of ash.

***

Walt’s heart was pumping, as if his entire body was suddenly on fire. They were going to get caught, someone was going to catch them and if they did, getting killed would be the best thing that could happen to them. He knew enough about what the cartels did to people who crossed them… and God… he didn’t want to stick around…

“Get in a car! Get in a car!”

“Which one?” Jesse yelled back.

“I don’t know!” Walt snapped, “An open one! One with keys in it! One we can fucking drive!”

“Okay, okay!” Jesse snapped back, and there was a little comfort in that. Old times.

Walt was having trouble sucking in a breath. This was not the time to have a coughing fit, this was the worst possible time. And wasn’t he in remission anyway? It had to just be stress. His head was burning up too… he needed to stay focused.

“Jesse? Jesse, you got it yet?”

Only now did he think to turn around and look for Gale. The man was there, lingering behind Jesse, but he was limping. Walt didn’t know what had happened to him but he was alive, they were all alive. That was what mattered.

That was half the battle.

“I found it!” Jesse exclaimed, gesturing wildly to a red car.

“Well open the door,” Walt snapped through the haze. “Let’s get out of here… we don’t have any time to lose.”

He was losing consciousness fast.


	13. Chapter 13

Everything had gone fuzzy for Gale, and he could feel people grabbing at him, pulling him in every direction. He wasn’t sure which way was the right way, which way would be back towards the cartel and which way would be towards freedom, hopefully, with Walt and Jesse. He didn’t even have time to think about how frustrating it was to think that pair of names.

He told himself that if he got back home in one piece, he would never be frustrated over Walter White ever again. He would find someone completely different, someone who wasn’t hung up on a twenty-five year old for whatever Freudian reason. Or maybe he wouldn’t find anyone at all. Maybe he would just sit in his apartment, listen to classical, and finally get around to reading The Kite Runner.

He ducked behind a tank and clapped his hands over his mouth, before pressing his hand to the ground and crouching down. The words from his school days were mockingly playing in his head – stop, drop and roll.

Gale didn’t want to think about what would happen if the cartel got a hold of him. He had never been a big fan of “24”, but he had heard all about Jack Bauer and was quite sure that something similar to that was going to await him. At best, he would be stuck in there, cooking for the rest of his days. He’d never see his apartment again, or talk to his parents, or lay down on his bed and breathe in his favorite fabric softener… some of the things he tended to take for granted.

He wished he could stop himself from breathing, because it seemed too loud. The only hope was that they were as confused or more confused than Gale was, or that whatever had been released into the air had poisoned them. 

He felt a little twinge of guilt for wishing that, but it didn’t last long. After all, they were trying to kill him. Trying to kill them all. And Gale wanted to be a good man, but he didn’t want to be some kind of martyr. Who would even be around to remember him for getting killed off here? His parents and sister didn’t know the half of what was going on with him. They thought he had a “good chemical laboratory job”, which is what he had told them and which was, in a way, sort of true, if you left out the fact that it was in a methamphetamine laboratory, or even that he had been fired and replaced.

He tried not to let his family in on any bad news. He had to try and be the perfect son, as best as he could. He was the oldest, after all. He had to be the one to go all of the exotic places, to be a financial success… He had to be the outlier. Gina was a wonderful person, but she was content being a stay-at-home mom, and Gale had always suspected their parents had wanted more than that for both of them.

If Gina wasn’t going to do it, it would have to be Gale. 

If Gale got out of this alive, that was. 

He hadn’t met his little niece and nephew yet. He had kept putting it off until things slowed down at the lab. 

Now he might never get the chance. He sucked in a breath, tried to make himself as quiet and small as possible. Maybe with three targets to look for, they’d forget about Gale entirely and he could slip out.

Fat chance.

“There!” he heard someone yell in Spanish. He had been spotted. 

It was time to take off like a bat out of Hell. He sprang up and took off, wheezing a little as he tried to run. If he ever got out of here, he was going to start going to the gym. Every single day of his life. 

Something, or someone, grabbed his foot, and Gale’s face smashed into the floor with a slam. He was sure that he’d broken something, but he was also sure that that was going to be the least of his problems when this was over. He tried to kick the person off – he briefly considered trying to step on their hand, like he’d seen in some messed up action flicks, but it seemed too brutal and even for his life, he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Instead, he began to thrash around his foot desperately, trying to get free. 

When that didn’t help, he started to scream. It wasn’t because it was a good idea. It was because he couldn’t think of anything else to do but scream and kick.

Somehow, it seemed to buy him enough time. Maybe it had been surprising enough to hear Gale scream like that. 

He scrambled to his feet, though he didn’t know where he was meant to be running.

“Walt! Jesse! Help!” he yelled. It came out not right, like he was calling for a lost dog or something weird like that. It didn’t carry the severity of the situation. It felt as if he was calling into a vacuum in space, or listening to his voice echo off the walls of a cave. “Walt! Jesse!” His mind kept telling him that he was alerting those who were following him just as much as he might be alerting Walt or Jesse, and Walt and Jesse both might be gone, might have left him or they might have both been captured already or they both might be dead in the ground, and where would that leave him? That would leave him dead in the ground too because of the three of them, he was the least likely to survive and he knew it.

He hoped they hadn’t left him. And in that moment, hope was the only thing left to have. It was fluttering in the dark like a dragonfly with a broken wing.


	14. Chapter 14

“Mr. White…” Jesse was looking through some kind of field for him, but he was just out of reach. It felt like he was walking on the moon, or at least what he figured that would be like. Strangely enough, he had a feeling like Jane was there, too. It was a weird place to be.

Jane was telling him that he couldn’t slow down, that he needed to keep running. That there were some secrets he would find, but he had to keep looking for them.

“Don’t slow down, baby, or you’ll die.”

Jesse wanted to tell her that maybe that was okay, that maybe he would rather be there with her, because things made sense in that place… That he loved her, and everything was right when she was around.

But he didn’t have time to dwell on it, because his eyes were wide open now, like someone had pried the eyelids apart against his will. 

“Jesse, wake up.” Mr. White was shaking him, and shaking him hard. He could almost feel his brains rattling around in his skull.

He pulled away from the older man.

“Quit it!” he snapped, shaking his hands free. “What’s going on?”

“You passed out,” Mr. White explained. Jesse looked around. He was in the passenger’s seat of a car. “How’d you get this?” he asked, but Mr. White showed no signs of answering him. “What about Gale?” Jesse waited for a half a second for a response, then repeated the question frantically, adding, “We’ve got to go back, then. We’ve got to get him.”

“Jesse! We’re finally home free.” 

“It wouldn’t be right. We can’t do it. We need to go back.”

***

They came back to carnage. People were keeled over, gasping, and a few others seemed to have been shot in the struggle. Maybe they had mistaken each other for the three chemists – whatever it was, Jesse considered it a lucky break, and some sort of sign from the almighty that the decision to come back had been the right one.

Then again, he didn’t see Gale anywhere, and neither, it seemed, did Mr. White. Maybe they had come too late; maybe Jesse’s pang of conscience was going to end up being meaningless. He felt the same sense of desperation he’d had when he woke up that morning and banged his hands against Jane’s chest, trying to breathe life back into her but only hearing that dismal rattle.

And then there was something in the distance. A single hand waving, signaling to them.

“Gale!” Jesse yelled, forgetting that he ought to be quiet, forgetting that there might still be some of them alive, and forgetting that this might not even be Gale but one of them, and then it would be all over.

He rushed over to the figure, and in his ears he could hear sounds like firecrackers. He wasn’t sure whether they were real or only an attempt for his mind to try and come up with a preamble to his own death. His death, in Mexico, lonely… Or maybe not. Was it lonely to die beside two other people who you only sort of knew? They were business associates, or whatever it was exactly. Mr. White he knew better but Gale… the Gale he was risking his life for… did he know him at all?

Jesse was running to him; he couldn’t figure out the answer to his question. Who was Gale? He didn’t know, but it really didn’t matter.

He clapped his hand around the other man’s and pulled him up, pulled him to safety.

“You came back for me!” he cried out. “You didn’t leave me!”

“We wouldn’t ever,” Jesse said back quickly, pulling him as he did. “But now we have to get the hell out of dodge and quick, before somebody comes looking. There’s no time… Come on.”

He nearly dragged him over to the car and into the back seat. He was riding shotgun, now.

Someone’s crying lord, kumbaya, Jesse thought to himself. It didn’t mean anything anymore. Nothing meant anything anymore; things just kept floating through Jesse’s mind. Like that they were free.

That they were free and that they had to go back to Gus and explain what had happened, figure out where everyone had gone wrong. And if Gus had been the one to sell them off in the first place? What was going to happen then? Another kind of imprisonment, or worse? 

How had they all gotten into this mess, this prison from which there was no escape?

The car was starting off and some part of Jesse was screaming. He slowly realized that it was his voice, that he was making that sound and it wasn’t all in his head.

And that Mr. White was yelling at him to shut up.

“Even with the windows down, you’re attracting too much goddamned attention!” Mr. White yelled, “You want some other bad people to pull over and take us away! Sit down, shut up and act natural!”

Jesse started to laugh.

“Natural?” he asked, “Natural how? What’s that supposed… supposed to mean, Mr. White?”

“What I mean is, Jesse, act like your normal idiot self. It’s not something that you should have any trouble with.” He floored the gas and started motoring down the highway – so much for acting natural, Jesse thought, he was going to attract the attention of everyone going this fast. Or maybe this was how everybody drove in Mexico; Jesse didn’t really know. He just knew that being “natural” was something he wasn’t sure was ever going to happen again. He had been here, he had seen these things, and he had come back from the brink of death.

No one could see these things and be normal again. At least there was the three of them now; at least they had each other. 

Jesse’s eyes were blinking wildly as he looked back and forth between Mr. White and Gale. 

“We did it, we did it…” he whispered. “We’re free. We’re free…”


	15. Chapter 15

Walter had decided not to tell Skyler anything. Anything more than she already knew, and she’d have another reason to try to keep him from the children, try to force through the divorce that he’d sworn he would never agree to. So, no, he would tell Skyler nothing at all.

He would go back into his home, or some days in his condo, and he would sit and think back, and sometimes he would close his eyes and be sure that he was back in Mexico, that he had never truly left. The whole thing seemed so surreal that some days he couldn’t remember leaving at all. If he couldn’t remember leaving, the closest point between two straight lines indicated that he had never left, that this was all some kind of mirage. That Gale and Jesse were right next to him and they were still trapped in the same hell.  
He hadn’t talked to them, either, not since he got back. He didn’t want some kind of debriefing situation, and he definitely didn’t want to talk about his feelings. Gale and Jesse were the type of people who seemed like they would want to talk about their feelings. Not like Jesse would admit it, of course – he’d just flash those sad blue eyes and expect Walt to give him a chance, or to make him open up. But what was he supposed to say? That they’d nearly died together, that they’d survived? What were they supposed to do now? They would think that Walt knew. Walt didn’t know. How would he be expected to know?

Gus still kept pulling them into the lab, all three of them, but Walt figured it was all a test. Soon, he would decide which of the three was dispensable. Walt knew that person wouldn’t be him – but what was the answer for Jesse, then, or Gale then? Would they simply be fired or, by virtue of this little trip, this crazy hostage situation, did they now all know too much?

Gale had been selected, they knew how, by virtue of a scholarship. How many other winners were out there? How many were being groomed for the “honor” of working in Gus’ labs, for being bait for the next cartel strike?

Walt paced so much that he wore holes in every pair of shoes he owned.

The only thing he knew for a fact was that it wasn’t over.

***

Jesse thought that Gale’s apartment was one of the strangest places to call home he’d ever seen. It was covered in stuff from all the different places the man had traveled over the years. Jesse had only ever been out of Albuquerque, latest trip aside, to go to Orlando and Disney World.

Gale, on the other hand, seemed to have been everywhere – Vietnam, Thailand, Ireland. 

“I was lucky,” he told Jesse. Jesse thought that Gale was trying to be modest, but not really succeeding. “My parents sent me on a backpacking trip after I graduated. They saved up so I could do that… and it really meant a lot. And well, of course I saved money by going to college on Mr. Fring’s scholarship. Maybe now… Maybe you could get help from him too, Jesse. Have you ever thought about college?”

Jesse curled up his nose.

“Of course I have. I mean, it’s not like we couldn’t afford it. I just wasn’t good enough. My parents would’ve been glad if I went. I guess.”

“Then why not go?” Gale smiled. “My parents… Well, they don’t know what I do, of course. But they love me. They’re good people. I have a little sister, too.”

Jesse cocked his head to the side and took a deep breath.

“Do you ever think about Mexico?” he asked.

“Of course I do. All the time… why?”

“Because I… can’t get it out of my head, like maybe that was a mistake, maybe it was all a lie and we’re still there.”

Gale shook his head.

“Nah. I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe that you can dream up an entire world, dream up an entire existence, and then wake up and you’re somewhere else. Part of you would know. The brain always wants to orient itself. It always wants to know what’s real. If we were trapped in some kind of a loop… We would know.”

“But… what about when what’s real feels fake, too, Gale? What do we do then?”

Gale looked back at Jesse and shrugged.

“I don’t have any answers, Jesse.”

“What good are the fancy degrees, if you don’t get any answers?”

Gale just looked at him and laughed. 

***

The days turned into weeks. The production schedules kept coming. There seemed to be something on the horizon, but no one spoke of it. Maybe Mike did, and Gus – but Walt was caught in his little world, his little subsystem, where he was king and Jesse and Gale were his princes of sorts.

One day, he would die, of course. That was what had led him to this life in the first place. That “someday” becoming a fixed point, a light in the distance turning into the train barreling down the track to run him over. 

He was feeling more and more unease whenever he was home. This wasn’t the place for him. The lab wasn’t, either. Maybe he had left more and more of himself in Mexico.  
Or maybe, Mexico had showed him what he could be, if he really focused on it. Hadn’t he always been dedicated to being the best? If he was going to kow-tow to Gus, wouldn’t that be as if he’d never left Gretchen and Elliot, ended up being satisfied to take just a piece of what he’d been responsible for?

Maybe Jesse and Gale wouldn’t see it. Hell, they probably wouldn’t.

But he’d make them see. He’d make them understand in the end.

Walt looked up at his ceiling and rubbed his hands together.

One thing he understood now – the three of them, together, were unstoppable. No one could stand against them. Not even Gustavo Fring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End! :) Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed! :D


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